Pakistan hit by nationwide blackout

Millions of people are affected; a senior official says the electricity supply will be restored in 12 hours

Large parts of Pakistan and all of its major cities have been left without power this morning due to a breakdown of the national grid system. Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan told Geo News that power will be fully restored within 12 hours.

The affected areas include the capital, Islamabad, as well as Karachi, Lahore, Quetta, and Peshawar. According to the media, the majority of the population of 231 million people have been impacted by the outages.

Dastgir Khan said power units were first temporarily shut down at night to save on fuel costs. But when they were being turned on at 7:30am local time, a “frequency variation” was reported in the southern part of the country.

“There was a fluctuation in voltage and power generating units were shut down one by one due to cascading impact. This is not a major crisis,” Dastgir Khan stated.

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According to the Energy Ministry, power has since been partially restored in Islamabad and Peshawar.

A similar outage occurred in October, when Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Quetta, Multan, and Faisalabad were left without power. Electricity was fully restored in 12 hours.